Free The Age of Gold by H.W. Brands

flour, a tin pitcher or bowl capable of withstanding the heat of a fire; a hunter’s gear; and a fire-flint.
    Their ship was a French bark, the
Stanguéli
, which was so crowded that Pérez and his companions had to leave their common equipment for the next vessel. The departure evoked equal measures of anxiety and anticipation. “California for the Chileans was an unknown country, nearly a desert, full of dangers and infested besides by epidemics of disease,” Pérez wrote. “There we had no friends or relatives to lend a hand; personal safety could be found only at the barrel of a pistol or the point of a dagger; and nevertheless, the risk of robbery, violence, sickness, death itself, were secondary considerations before the dazzling promise of gold.”
    The passengers were ninety men, two women (including a prostitute named Rosario Améstica, a favorite among the men), four cows, eight pigs, and three dogs (besides the seventeen sailors and the captain and pilot). Most seemed ordinary enough, but two attracted the special attention of Pérez Rosales. One was a gentleman named álvarez, a Chilean by birth, eccentric to the point of paranoia. Though rich and able to afford the first cabin, he refused it, saying the Frenchmen operating the boat were all thieves and would not feed him as well as he could feed himself with the food he brought aboard. The other noteworthy passenger was “a Frenchman of such massive hips that, to enter the passageway through the narrow door that communicated with the cabin, he always had to turn sideways. For this we gave him the mischievous name
Culatus
[Big Butt].”
    The ship set sail just after the solstice of the Southern Hemisphere summer, and for the first month the passengers and crew sweltered northtoward the equator. On January 18, 1849, Pérez Rosales entered in his diary: “Until today our only torment has been the exasperating monotony and the suffocating heat.” Amid the torpor the ship crossed the equator; none could rouse themselves to celebrate.
    Yet before the mast, the steerage passengers were restive. “álvarez is at the heart of the matter,” Pérez wrote, “for it seems that his provisions, poorly distributed, will not last until the end of the voyage. We fear a mutiny on board.”
    Next day the ship sighted another vessel, which upon approach proved to be an American whaler. The Yankee captain dropped a boat, which rowed over to the
Stanguéli
. The captain was friendly and modest; the sailors who accompanied him were eager for faces and voices other than their own. The sailors grew more than eager upon perceiving one face— and form—in particular; they “nearly fainted with envy to see among us the charming Rosarito.”
    The captain told how he and his men had been thirty-nine months at sea without once touching land. (Either the Yankee captain, in the telling, or Pérez Rosales, in the retelling, may have been exaggerating; whalers often went long without landing, but rarely that long.) He savored the luncheon set before him: the soft bread and fresh meat, which he had almost forgotten after three years of hardtack and salt pork. The Chileans were lucky, he said, and doubly so to be off for the goldfields to win their fortunes. But he added, with the sigh of the homesick, “I do not envy your luck, for I am on my way to embrace my children.”
    The Americans continued south toward Valparaiso, carrying the Chileans’ good wishes and their hastily scrawled letters; the
Stanguéli
proceeded slowly north. The restiveness in steerage persisted, until on the last day of January, when Pérez Rosales and the other cabin passengers were dining with the officers, a seaman burst into the saloon and frantically whispered a message to the captain. The captain turned to his messmates and declared, in a voice of alarm, “We have a revolution on board! álvarez is leading it, and if you don’t help me, we are lost!”
    Pérez and the others literally leaped into action.